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Editorial
Maths A-levels are "too easy"
Article
Chaos in Numberland: The secret life of continued fractions
One of the most striking and powerful means of presenting numbers is completely ignored in the mathematics that is taught in schools, and it rarely makes an appearance in university courses. Yet the continued fraction is one of the most revealing representations of many numbers, sometimes containing extraordinary patterns and symmetries. John D. Barrow explains.
Article
Have we caught your interest?
Those who understand compound interest are destined to collect it. Those who don't are doomed to pay it - or so says a well-known source of financial advice. But what is compound interest, and why is it so important? John H. Webb explains.
Article
Codes, computers and trees
Underlying our vast global telecommunications networks are codes: formal schemes for representing information in machine-readable and transmissible formats. Kona Macphee examines the prefix property, one of the important features of a good code.
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Editorial
- New Millennium, New Name and New Look
- How to lie with statistics
- World maths year 2000
- Network capacity problem - issue 3 revisited
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The origins of proof IV: The philosophy of proof
Robert Hunt concludes our Origins of Proof series by asking what a proof really is, and how we know that we've actually found one. One for the philosophers to ponder...
News story
Planets, planets everywhere
Up until the late 1990s, astronomers couldn't be certain that any planets existed outside our solar system. These days, not only are astronomers confident that planets are out there, but new ones are being discovered all the time.
Article
Self-similar syncopations: Fibonacci, L-systems, limericks and ragtime
Kevin Jones investigates the links between music and mathematics, throwing in limericks, Fibonacci and Scott Joplin along the way. Plus is proud to present an extended version of his winning entry for the THES/OUP 1999 Science Writing Prize.
News story
Maths Year 2000
Around the country, maths is set to have a high profile this year with the launch of a new initiative.
Article
In space, do all roads lead to home?
Is the Universe finite, with an edge, or infinite, with no edges? Or is it even stranger: finite but with no edges? It sounds far-fetched but the mathematical theory of topology makes it possible, and nobody yet knows the truth. Janna Levin tells us more.
News story
Martian mayhem
In a major and expensive setback for NASA's Mars program, both the Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander spacecraft appear to have been lost. Soberingly, while the fate of the Mars Polar Lander is unclear, it appears that the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a simple mathematical error.
News story
Probing the pint
Australians have a reputation for being fond of their beer. Some Aussie scientists from Sydney are so fond of it that they've actually solved the age-old puzzle of why the bubbles in a glass of Guinness appear to sink rather than rise.